I was reading the last RC thread and was concerned to see that someone actually suggested removing Perl from dsl.

Fortunately it was pointed out that various tools and packages depend on Perl (besides ndiswrapper I suspect dpkg might be one of these).

Apart from that: Perl is the one language, other than Bash, that you do *expect* to find on any nix system. This is because it is a proven tool in the *nix arsenal, and it's far more powerful than Bash (no comparison, until Bash at least gets associative arrays, can talk to hardware directly, and can match and extract more than one pattern on the same line). In fact I'd love to see a MB or two found to put some core Perl modules back, in particular for networking.

While everyone has their views on such things (no holy wars), we're never going to have room to see Python, Ruby or any of those fat latter day scripty languages in the dsl base. And those languages (by their own admission - see the Python docs) don't have anything like the vast array of extension modules that Perl has in CPAN anyway.